laying ground work for new campaign

[Stahn Li]

I am starting a new campaign and wanted to see if I culd get some general ideas of enworld

I just started working on this new campaign, don't even have players lined up yet,but here are the basic premise.

Its a world with abouth 8 major nations. Each nation has a network of uderground agents that do all the "dirty work" needed to run a country.

In a secret meeting one of the top agents from each nation meet in a plot to take over the civilized world and divide it up amongst themselves. The are tired of doing all the hard work and watching there respective kings and queens profit. Since they are the ones who know how to pull all the strings they believe that if they combine forces no one can stop them.

Here are some basic ideas of some of these agents.

An old wise royal advisor (started idea)
A young talented advisor (put the idea in motion)
A sadistic and hateful enchater
A practical and cautious Illusionist
A dwarven rouge sniper
A rouge that refuses to ever fight in actual combat, but uses evasion skills, and charisma based skills to accomplish his goals
An elderly bard
A bizarly strong warrior seeking for greater meaning


I also may create some lesser agents, and when their plans are set in motion many of these agents will have a network of underlings ready to assist them.Also it is not well known that these people exist, and each nation would not tell other nations about them for security reasons.

So what I am trying to figure out now is how would they try and take over, how could a party of pc's stop them. How would the keep themsleves secret.


Just throwing this out there, any help is appreciated.

 

[Telperion]

It's a nice enough concept. Nice variation away from your classic "spook-look".

Here on some thoughts on world domination:
-Take it one step at a time. Create a rough timeline that the agents use as a guideline to victory.

-Create intelligent and pragmatic goals for the agents to reach along their way to greatness. You can't exactly pull this of with one big "trick" and expect to be "king of the world" for more than a day or so.

-War is good for confusion and paranoia. Inciting it something that these agents should be able to do with little effort, if they are truly working together.

-Take over one kingdom at a time, and don't be obvious about it. Go after the rulers public image, trustworthiness and other non-tangible areas. This way you leave less traces for others to follow. And once the agents have gotten rid of the old ruler then it's time to put up a puppet ruler the agents can control. Being a visible ruler is very hard. Ruling from behind a well-behaving puppet is much easier, if you don't ago around committing obsceneties, random violence, force major changes on a population or do other stupid things like that.

-Allow those agents to be smart. If everything is going wrong for them allow them an option of making a quick exit. Having a backup plan (or two) is always a good idea.

-If the characters interfere with the agents work then use the resources of a whole kingdom to put them in their place. Why dirty your own hands, or those of an underling, when you can just let the legal courts handle the PCs and send them to slavery/prison/exile? Of course the agents might have to "help" the local authorities realize how "evil" and "bad" the characters really are, but that shouldn't be a great problem.

-Make the characters believe they are actually fighting a whole Kingdom, where ever they go, instead of a fairly small group of people who are manipulation everyone else.

-Assume that the agenst have plenty of eyes and ears, so they get good intel quickly and from plenty of places. A blind and deaf agent is a dead agent.

 

[Piratecat]

The trick will be to destabilize and control. I'm not sure that each agent would want to rule their kingdom; expect some infighting and back-biting ("His kingdom has gold mines, and mine has swamps. I want his!") and allow some people to rule through puppet kings.

How are your royal families defined? If (as was true historically) they are believed to be annointed by the Gods and divinely mandated as leaders, it makes it trickier to have an out-and-out revolution.

 

[RangerWickett]

What are PCs to do against this, and how do they first notice the problem? This is sounding kinda like The X-Files, with the level of conspiracy involved. You'd need paranoid characters to get involved.

 

[Cannibal_Kender]

You almost need a character who has some small idea at least that "something" is going on at the beginning of the campaign. To continuw with what RangerWickett said, this would be Mulder (I know the government is hiding the existence of aliens...I just have to prove it!!).

 

[Stahn Li]

Ok here is what I was thinking to start off, I have some names now to worl with too, although I may change some.

The initial agents

Jolav (older royal advisor) and Ravin (younger royal advisor) are each advisor to two seperate nations that are perhaps the most powerful of the known wolrd. (There personalities will wind up being similar to the two commanders in the anime Evangeleon because they were cool). These tow nations have been involved in a minor war over a land despute that invilved mustly scirmishes at this point.

Jolav will present intelligence to his nation (Trayjar) data that will show a keep fortress in the nation Kerid will be undermaned for a short period of time and convince his king to use the oppurtunity to attack. This intelligence is infact incorrect and fabricated as part of the conspiracy.

The fortress is in fact fully manned with a large division of heavy cavalry a days ride away,this information is being conceled by Ravin. The atttack will prove catstrophic for the nation Trayjar as the well equiped fortress and heavy cavalry completly route a major army.

During the attack however an assination attempt will occur ont Kerids ruling king. The agents Kiosis (deranged enchanter) and Dresden (pratical illusionist) will arange for a unkown warrior called the Stonecutter to enter the palace and kill the king and royal guard. It will also appear that Ravin the advisor was also killed (he was not, but it is a sophisticated illusion made by Dresden)

Kerids new king will seek revenge for the death of his father and take advantage of the recent route by planning a full asualt against the nation of Trayjar. The royal advisor Jolav will flee in fear of execution for advising the inital assualt which turned out to be a military blunder.

Now the two greatest nations are at war and both conspirators are free to plot, since one is thought to be in exile and the other thought dead.

The PC's will start out as soliders on either side of the assualt on the initial attakc at the fortress. I am hoping to start them off as part of the siege because I think it would be cool to have a combat were pc's are in a sige tower about to assualt a castle wall. Durirng the assualt they will witness the two mages (Kiosis and Dresden) as the aid the Stonecutter assasian to enter the palace.

After the battle the Pc's will be confronted by a man who was formelly responsible of tracking Kiosis's wareabouts. He has some leads about a brewing conspiracy but knows little. He actually thinks Kiosis is leading the conspiracy and knows nothing of Jolavs and Ravins involvment. This man however is smart enought to know his questions have doomed him and that soon Kiosis will kill him to silence him. He needs a group of low level people to continue his work. He needs people who will draw little attention and concern and can start to ask questions and live long enough to find answers. He chooses the PC party becuase they have the obscurity needed.

 

[RangerWickett]

I'm bumping this because I think I'm going to be collaborating with my old friend Stahn Li on this game, and it will be useful to have it handy for reference. With significant revisions. Like maybe I can convince him to use the Grim Tales rules. Hmm.

 

[random user]

Here are my initial thoughts on this:

- if you have players like my players, you need to think through the assassination thoroughly. Even if they don't now have the access to the information, there is a very good chance at some point they will get the opportunity to learn about it (either through questioning people or consulting divinations etc), and it's very important that you don't have inconsistancies because your players will latch onto those. Also it needs to be believable once it's fully known. Assassinating a king is no easy business. With the help of the advisor I can see it happening, but you should have an outline of all the trickery the advisor needed to do to accomplish this (like disabling/avoiding traps, knowing where the guards are, etc etc).

- I would have a hard time seeing how a warrior would be able to kill the king and his royal guard, unless the guard was merely ceremonial, which doesn't make a lot of sense either unless maybe the land has had 500 years of peace and no one thinks of violence. More likely would be something like the PrC Assassin using poison, perhaps with some levels of fighter too.

- you need a way for speak with dead, raise dead, and other such things to not work (isn't there a spell somewhere that makes stone talk?) or at least don't blow open the conspiracy.

- what happened to stonecutter? If he was killed, there needs to be a logical reason how he could have killed the king and his guard but then succumb to whatever he died to. If he didn't die, then there needs to be some reason why divination spells can't reach him. Also if he died, the corpse needs to be disposed of somehow, or else speak with dead could be problematic here too.

- it seems that if you are in a trusted position, leaving that trusted position isn't the wisest course of action, unless they believe that both kingdoms can be neutralized quickly by another party. Having one kingdom win would be (I assume) counter to their objective. Regardless, there should be a logical reason why both of these advisors have decided to leave their high-power and trusted positions where they probably could have sown a lot more seeds of discord.

Those are some things I would make sure to have an answer for. Going forward, here are some thoughts:

- how x-filesy do you want to make it? One thought is to conceal the truth in a lie. After the party hears that there is a conspiracy, the king (well his representative) sends for the party. It turns out there is some talk of a conspiracy, which the king knows is not true, but he has to make a show of dealing with it. That's where the party comes in. The party is to try and uncover the conspiracy (which the king will again reinterate doesn't exist) and to report back.

Of course the party will find evidence... but the king will have other explanations, but keep them on to discover more as he doesn't think politically he can dismiss them anymore.

- work the other side: a member of the conspiracy will contact the party members letting them in on one secret part (not the whole thing of course). He will say that he's secretly working in the interests of the king, and ask them to do something. They'll work for the wrong side for a while before realizing that they are being duped. After that, hopefully they'll have incentive to really find out what's going on.

- cookie crumbs. Have them get plot hooked into various things, all seemingly innocuous by themselves. Perhaps they hear about the conspiracy but then don't do anything about it. Maybe they will then go on an adventure near where the assassin lived and they find out random stuff about that. Maybe another adventure will take them somewhere where else and foil something the conspiracy was working on and they get some information. If they are smart if you give them enough crumbs, eventually they'll make a cookie for you.

Umm... well those are some thoughts at least. Hope it helps, or at least gets you thinking in a new direction.